The CEO of JetBlue is promising action and penalties paid to passengers if his airline has another breakdown like this week. Saying he was “humiliated and mortified” at his company’s performance, there isn’t much else he can do but make some major changes given the enormity of the goof ups this week. As we passed through an airport to a different airline on Saturday, we saw a huge line at JetBlue and the tension was so thick you could cut it with a knife.
We had our own very minor incident on boarding our flight with AirTrans and some of our fellow passengers reaction to it point out just how much work JetBlue has to do. After boarding unaccompanied minors there was a delay in boarding the rest of the plane. After about 20 minutes it was announced that the plane was one crew member short and that FAA regulations required three crew members in order to board passengers. After another 15 minutes a crew member came to the plane and we boarded. But the fun wasn’t over. Turns out crew member number 3 was a quick stand in to get the plane boarded and we still needed to wait for the real third crew member. Intriguingly, once that was announced all the talk on the plane was about this being a JetBlue situation. The good news, for us at any rate, was we only sat on the plane for another 10 minutes before we were fully staffed and on the way.
Regardless of the PR and damage control spin, I still hope we end up with some sort of airline passenger bill of rights though. Arrogance in the case of a customer crisis never pays off.
